News Wrap: Death toll from Japan earthquake rises to 34 — PBS NewsHour

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News Wrap: Death toll from Japan earthquake rises to 34 — PBS NewsHour | AIPROPX

In our news wrap Friday, this week's powerful earthquake in Japan has claimed at least 34 lives, a sweltering heat dome descended over much of the West, a Marine Corps fighter jet crashed at Miramar Air Station in California and President Trump says the U.S. has not yet agreed to let Ukraine build Patriot missiles to aid in its fight against Russia. Also today, officials in Japan say this week's powerful earthquake has claimed at least 34 lives. Emergency crews are racing to find survivors in a collapsed shopping mall in Kumamoto. Officials call today a critical window. The odds of finding anyone alive are fading by the hour, even as other rescue operations wind down. The disaster is also straining daily life. Grocery shelves sit empty in several towns as thousands of residents stock up on essentials. And with power out across wide areas, many of the displaced say they have no choice but to sleep in their cars, enduring punishing summer heat with no relief in sight. Haruto Kubo, Displaced Resident (through interpreter): I have been living inside the car. We go out during the day to do some shopping. We drive to get food for the day, and we eat inside the car. At night, I haven't been able to sleep. Geoff Bennett: Nearly 10,000 people remain under evacuation orders across the three hardest-hit provinces. And in Kumamoto, authorities say close to 80,000 homes are still without running water. Here in the U.S., a sweltering heat dome descended over much of the West today, and forecasters say that heat is here to stay through the weekend. Peak temperatures are expected in many places on Saturday from Arizona to Montana. Some parts of Utah, Nevada, and California could reach between 100 and 120 degrees. Experts warn those conditions create a heightened risk for heat-related illness, and dry vegetation could add fuel for wildfires. President Trump says the U.S. has not yet agreed to let Ukraine build Patriot missiles to aid in its fight against Russia. Speaking at that Cabinet meeting from Camp David, Mr. Trump said he needed to be judicious about allowing foreign manufacturing of the sophisticated U.S. technology. Donald Trump: We have to be very careful about letting somebody build them. We're talking about it. But it's a hard thing to give away that kind of technology. And I don't think this would ever happen, but those people that you give that technology, they can someday turn on you. Geoff Bennett: That appeared to be a backtrack from a promise President Trump gave to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month, saying he'd -- quote -- "give Ukraine the right to build the missiles." A Marine Corps fighter jet crashed today at Miramar Air Station in California, erupting into flames and sending a plume of smoke into the air. The F-35B stealth fighter jet appeared to go down just short of the runway. Fire crews covered the records with foam and worked to extinguish a grass fire sparked by the crash. The pilot ejected safely and was recovered. The cause of the crash is under investigation. The Seattle Police Department has a new interim head after its police chief abruptly resigned over the department's handling of last weekend's food festival shooting. In a statement, Chief Shon Barnes wrote that he hoped his departure would, as he put it, return full focus to what matters most, addressing youth gun violence. Barnes faced criticism that the department was too slow to release initial information about Sunday's deadly shooting. Today, city officials, including the mayor, apologized for how public communication was handled. Katie Wilson (D), Mayor of Seattle, Washington: I definitely want to own my part in that, right? So I think part of this is communication failures within SPD, and part of that is communication failures between SPD and my office. Geoff Bennett: Meantime, investigators are still searching for other suspects who may have been involved in the shooting. Cybersecurity concerns are mounting after Anthropic said its A.I. models hacked into three organizations during testing. The company behind Claude said it happened during a large-scale security run to see if its models could access the Internet from testing environments that are meant to be sealed off. Anthropic launched the review in response to a similar incident last week, when one of OpenAI's models went rogue and hacked another company. Anthropic said two of the three models involved in the hack were publicly available versions of Claude and that they used basic techniques like exploiting weak passwords. Major oil companies reported some of their highest quarterly profits in years, as the U.S. war with Iran has driven up energy prices across the globe. ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the country, more than doubled its profits from this time last year. Chevron quadrupled its second-quarter profits. Across the country, gas prices, after peaking in may and declining in June, are once again on the rise. On the Wall Street, stocks finished positive to end the week. The Dow Jones industrial average posted its fourth straight winning month to end July. The Nasdaq rose by an even 1 percent, and the S&P 500 also made a solid gain.